In the weeks before the Straussian neocons invaded Iraq, we were told only a few thousand Iraqis, at most, would die in the initial onslaught. Of course, thanks to the Pentagon, uninterested in body counts, we do not have a good idea of how many Iraqis died in the initial assault, and to make matters worse, "Iraq's Health Ministry ordered a halt to a count of civilians killed during the war and told its statistics department not to release figures compiled so far," the Associated Press reported in December, 2003, months after the invasion. The following year, however, a British medical journal, the Lancet, conducted surveys in Iraq and determined that over 100,000 Iraqis had died since the invasion, the Washington Post reported. Now we are told a "major American attack on Iran's nuclear sites would kill up to 10,000 people and lead to war in the Middle East," according to the Oxford Research Group.

Attacking the Bushehr nuclear facility alone would be a nightmare, releasing radiation into the atmosphere, the report notes. "To attack Iran's nuclear facilities will not only provoke war, but it could also unleash clouds of radiation far beyond the targets and the borders of Iran," Elias Tuma, of the Arab Internet Network, told the Federal News Service last March. In addition, it is almost a certainty Iran would retaliate by hitting Israel's Dimona nuclear complex (military experts view this as unlikely, however Europeans "are fretting over the risk of radiation releases from Dimona and, more likely, Iran's bombed nuclear plants," according to Eric Margolis).

However, even more Iranians will die from nuclear blast and radiation poisoning, as the United States Strategic Command, under instructions from the war criminal Dick Cheney, has drawn up a "contingency plan" that "includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons." According to Philip Giraldi (a former CIA officer) of the American Conservative, "the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing-that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack-but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections." Obviously, the lives of a few hundred thousand Iranians (the population of Tehran is 12,059,000) are not worth the career of one air force officer.

"Precision bombing could put Iran's weapons program back five to 10 years but within a month the situation would become 'an extremely dangerous conflict', says Prof Paul Rogers, the report's author," the Daily Telegraph reports. "The attack would result in 'a protracted military confrontation' involving Israel, Lebanon and some Gulf states." Not mentioned here is the most crucial component-if the United States and Israel attack Iran, U.S. troops in Iraq will have hell to pay, especially in the Shia south of the country. Iranian retaliation "would surely start with attempts to mobilize Shia partisans in Iraq to try to turn the Iraqi south into an extension of the insurgency in the Sunni triangle," Gary Sick, professor of Middle East studies at Columbia University and former National Security Council adviser to then President Jimmy Carter, told a congressional panel last February.

Moreover, within "minutes of any attack, Iran's air and sea forces could threaten oil shipments in the Persian Gulf as well as the Gulf of Oman. Iran controls the northern coast of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which oil tankers must navigate, and could sink ships, mine sea routes or bomb oil platforms," according to a Center for Strategic and International Studies report. Closing the Strait of Hormuz, and Iran turning off its oil spigot, would create immediate havoc in the world economy, so closely tied to petroleum. "Oil prices on the international markets would shoot up to $400 a barrel if an attack were to be carried out on Iran, a senior Revolutionary Guards commander warned" last September, according to Iran Focus. Billionaire globalist and neolib investor, George Soros, was a bit more modest, telling CNN Money last month that "Iran is on a collision course and I have a difficulty seeing how such a collision can be avoided" and this collision might jack oil prices up to $262 per barrel.

Either Cheney or the Straussian neocons are insane-courting depression and social and political disaster-or something else is up their sleeves. In order to understand what the Iran attack means in the larger context, it pays to examine the Straussian philosophy.

"Strauss thinks that a political order can be stable only if it is united by an external threat, and following Machiavelli, he maintains that if no external threat exists, then one has to be manufactured," writes Shadia Drury. "Because mankind is intrinsically wicked, he has to be governed," Strauss wrote. "Such governance can only be established, however, when men are united-and they can only be united against other people." Strauss' established governance, according to Drury, is made possible through "aggressive, belligerent foreign policy," and "[p]erpetual war, not perpetual peace, is what Straussians believe in." According to Jim Lobe, "Strauss' neoconservative students see foreign policy as a means to fulfill a 'national destiny'-as Irving Kristol defined it already in 1983-that goes far beyond the narrow confines of a 'myopic national security.'"

Attacking Iran, with its ensuing financial and social chaos, is precisely the sort of "national destiny" the Straussian neocons have in mind for America. "A sense of perpetual crisis and war cements the society together with absolute loyalty" to the ruling Straussians, explains Michael Doliner. The Straussians "are not, as some think, merely agents of Israel," Doliner continues.

Nor was the war fought merely for oil. They did not ally themselves with the religious right merely for expedience. They do not seek primarily to further the fortunes of Halliburton and Bechtel. All these are real motives, but they are peripheral motives. Their goal is to turn America into the Straussian State and rule it perpetually. Consequently, the debacle in Iraq [or the coming debacle in Iran] does not seriously affect their plans. Even the Katrina aftermath might not shake them. A Straussian society needs an endless war to supply a "them" against which "we" will do endless battle. The endless war, such a horrible prospect for the rest of us, provided the political glue to transform the United States of American from a liberal democracy to a Straussian totalitarian state.

Attacking Iran and courting disaster will provide the Straussian neocons with the perfect excuse to turn America into a dictatorship under the exigencies of nuclear war because they "want an endless war and the more embattled Americans feel the more inclined they will be to accept a strong ruler and the rest of the Straussian program."

And what is the "the rest of the Straussian program"? Doliner again:

Straussians would rip up American traditions starting from the Declaration of Independence, an Enlightenment document if there ever was one. Nothing could be more repellent to them than the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That is a description of decadent liberalism. They prefer death, bondage, and the fear of God (for others.) Straussians are orders of magnitude more subversive than any communist ever was. Paradoxically, Straussians do think that Cindy Sheehan's son Casey died for a noble cause, the transformation of the United States of America into the Straussian State. But of course they can never say so for their goal must remain a secret one. It must remain secret because the Straussian state is the good society only for the philosophers. Everyone else remains deluded and oppressed. While the "philosophers play with their puppies" the rest of us slave away or go off to die.

It is, of course, far too late to stop the Straussian neocon Iran attack. However, as negative as it may sound, we can take a bit of solace in the possibility that the United States will bite off more than it can chew. If the entire Middle East rises up in response to the unprovoked attack upon Iran-and, more ominous, Russia and China support the Muslim enemies of the perfidious Straussian neocons-there is a distinct chance the Straussian project will collapse and fail. However, the specter of nuclear war remains, as the fascistic Straussian neocons will certainly not go down without a fight-or without killing millions of innocent people. Before this happens, hopefully sanity will rule at the Pentagon and officers less concerned with their careers than the fate of mankind will step up and depose the Straussian neocons.

I dream of a day when Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Kristol, Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith, Libby, et al, are paraded before TV cameras in orange jumpsuits, shackled and humiliated, and soon to suffer the fate Hermann Goering, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and Rudolf Hess at the Nuremberg Trials. However, the people of America (not unlike the people of Nazi Germany or Stalin's Russia before them), as Wilhelm Reich knew before he was thrown in prison, "give impotent people with evil intentions the power to represent [them]. Only too late do [they] realize that again and again [they] are being defrauded. [They] must come to realize that [they] make [their] little men [their] own oppressors, and that [they] made martyrs out of [their] truly great men." Our oppressors, fast at work undermining what remains of our constitutional republic, are the Straussian neocons.